By approaching the human aspect in a deliberate and positive way – through a programme of change management – you can ensure new technologies are well-adopted, and highly adopted solutions will deliver the efficiencies, the productivity benefits and the Return on Investment your programme is seeking.

We must recognise that IT exists to provide a service to the business: today, every member of the business is a technology user, and today’s users are very adept at knowing what they need. The “build it and they will come” attitude is therefore no longer an effective approach to rolling out change. Today, if users are not considered when new software is deployed, they will typically seek out alternative ways of getting the job done – resulting in a failed implementation and potentially the use of uncontrolled and ungoverned ‘shadow IT’.

IT-imposed change may resonate with the enthusiastic “early adopter” minority of the user base, who are highly receptive to change and innovation. But the significant majority – who are likely to be ambivalent, at best, about the change management – need to be carefully informed and convinced of the benefits.

The upside is that, once they are onside, business colleagues who have bought into the new technology will work in your favour. Not only will they understand, adopt and use the systems more readily, but they will help others to do the same. A good programme of change management can therefore become self-sustaining.